I cannot answer all of these questions. It would be great if we had a direct line to Dr. Piantelli to ask him - perhaps we could work that out in the future. But, he is a critical resource to his funding company, Nichenergy, and his health is failing. Keep in mind that Piantelli has been working on Ni-H LENR longer than just about anyone, and generally with high end equipment at his disposal. Piantelli has seen continuous (years) of excess heat in Ni-H systems having NO lithium. He added a Li shell to expand the heat output yield when he saw the 6 MeV protons being generated (sounds a little like nuclear bomb technology). However, he does not have an in-situ charged particle spectrometer - something that he would dearly love to have. He has been examining semiconductor technologies that could be used to build such a sensor to advance his research. His measurements of charged particles have been in a cloud chamber in a reaction operating in "after death" mode.
I would say that Piantelli believes that the 6 MeV protons are correlated with excess heat. I believe Piantelli would say the protons are correlated with excess heat, but not commensurate with excess heat. I.E. the protons are not the source of all of the excess heat from the reaction, but merely a branch of the main reaction with the Ni. Piantelli is a systematic scientist. He needs to know the answers to these same questions with greater certainty to advance the science. But to get those answers, he needs in-situ measurements of the charged particles. So now he is in the position of having to invent, design, construct, and validate such a sensor before he can quantify these particles. His lab is not equipped to make such a sensor - its development probably requires access to a semiconductor research lab. On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 8:04 AM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> > wrote: > > This suggests that something nuclear is happening in the branch of the >> reaction that results in the ejection of the 6 MeV proton to supply the >> proton with its 6 MeV of energy. >> > > The impression I've taken away from what I've read of Piantelli's papers > is that he's seeing fast protons and wants to explain them on some level. > The approach he takes is to my mind pretty hand-wavy and reminds me of the > cartoon of the two scientists looking at a blackboard, with the step "then > a miracle occurs" sitting between the initial equations and the > conclusion. His explanation seems to go beyond the empirical evidence to > make assumptions about what's happening in a pretty detailed way. > > Assuming there are fast protons, my questions are these: > > - How many are there in the range of 6 MeV? Are they sporadic and > intermittent? Or are there a large number? > - Are they correlated with any excess heat? > - Are they commensurate with any excess heat? > > If the answer to the first question is that there are some fast protons > that are seen in an NiH system, or perhaps quite a few, it might be good to > work backwards from known and plausible reactions; e.g., a proton being > stripped off of a deuterium nucleus and hopping over to the lattice site. > This and perhaps other reactions would generate protons in the MeV range. > The hard part would be explaining what might be leading to this or a > similar reaction. > > Eric > >
